Wednesday, May 04, 2011

The uncensored econometrician

Yesterday in econometrics I, a student asked me "how do you know if you have an endogeneity problem?"

My reply:

"When you are reading the referee report on your paper and it says that some of your explanatory variables are 'clearly endogenous' and require instrumentation!"

Then another student asked, "how do you know you've solved your endogeneity problem?"

Me: "When you get the letter from the journal editor saying that your paper is accepted for publication".


3 comments:

MattW said...

Nicely done. My econometrics prof wasn't this frank about it, but he was pretty good. After learning about instrumental variables I thought it would be a rare thing to find a good IV that is usable, but then in later upper level classes where we looked at a lot of research they were all over the place.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ryan Langrill said...

I feel like Michael Polanyi of the "Republic of Science" would say this is a feature of the scientific community, not a bug. Perhaps.

Sorry about the above comment. Logged in as the wife...